How Many Bubbles in a Bar of Soap?

Quick, can you name all the people who were in the room when you were born?
Could you give the name and number of every supervisor you've ever had? Or
tell me the address or addresses of both your parents one year before your
birth?

If you have trouble answering any of the above questions, then the US government
may deny you a new US passport. And simply in order to apply, you may be asked
to divulge some extremely personal information, though I can't imagine any
good reason the government needs to know whether or not you were circumcised.

"Early last year, the State Department proposed
a new 'Biographical Questionnaire' for passport applicants, which
would have required anyone selected to receive the new long-form DS-5513 to
answer bizarre and intrusive personal trivia questions about everything
from whether you were circumcised (and if so, with what accompanying
religious rituals) to the dates of all of your mother's pre- and post-natal
medical appointments, your parents' addresses one year before you were
born, every address at which you have ever resided, and your lifetime
employment history including the names and phone numbers of each of
your supervisors at every job you have ever held.

"Most people would be unable to complete the proposed new form no matter
how much time and money they invested in research. Requiring someone to
complete Form DS-5513 would amount to de facto denial of their application
for a passport -- which, as
we told the State Department, appeared to be the point of the form."

These are the same tactics that US states in the South used to use to keep
blacks from voting during the Civil Rights Movement. The whites at the polling
booths would ask blacks impossible-to-answer questions like "How many seeds
in a watermelon?" or "How many bubbles in a bar of soap?" in order to deny
them voting privileges. Interesting how the federal government treats its
subjects like blacks in the Old South.

And note that Soviet Russia used bureaucracy to similar effect to delay or
deny passports to its subjects. Applications would get "lost" or linger
in the system for years. What's happening now is the same "soft totalitarianism" that
doesn't outright deny freedom of movement, but just makes getting outside
the border much more difficult to the point of impossibility.

Jim Sinclair of MineSense.com recommends that you get a passport with the
maximum validity period. According to Jim:

"All this may turn out to be is the birth of a new business whereby legal
counsel or accountants are required to make passport applications...Regardless,
getting a passport to a maximum period now is wise."

I'd even go so far as to recommend that even if you currently have a valid
passport but it only has a couple of years left on it, claim you've lost it
and apply for a new one now. Because you may not be able to apply for a new
US passport by the time your current one expires. Further I'd recommend getting
a second passport (along with citizenship, of course) from a country that
will treat you more like an honored guest instead of like a farm animal to
be used or a prisoner to be pushed around. Someplace like Paraguay.

Maybe this will just amount to an extra layer of expense for those seeking
US passports, like Jim says. Jim is a very smart guy and is worth listening
to. We here at TDV take a very jaundiced view of governments, however, and
always suspect them of being up to the very worst--especially the US government.

We believe that the US is slowly closing off the means for its subjects to
escape. The US needs to keep the productive ability of its citizen-cows as
collateral on the debt it keeps racking up. It must discourage the flight
of these citizen-cows as economic conditions in the US inevitably deteriorate
and encourage both capital and physical flight.

I don't know if the US will just outright make leaving the country illegal,
but the government may well make leaving impossible even if still technically
legal. US citizens will find themselves physically trapped inside the USSA.
Maybe then those repeated comparisons of the US to Stalinist Russia or Nazi
Germany won't see so far-fetched.

Anarcho-Capitalist. Libertarian. Freedom fighter against mankind's two biggest
enemies, the State and the Central Banks. Jeff Berwick is the founder of The
Dollar Vigilante, CEO of TDV Media & Services and
host of the popular video podcast, Anarchast.
Jeff is a prominent speaker at many of the world's freedom, investment and
gold conferences as well as regularly in the media including CNBC, CNN and
Fox Business.

Jeff's background in the financial markets dates back to his founding of Canada's
largest financial website, Stockhouse.com, in 1994. In the late '90s the company
expanded worldwide into 8 different countries and had 250 employees and a
market capitalization of $240 million USD at the peak of the "tech bubble".
To this day more than a million investors use Stockhouse.com for investment
information every month.

Jeff was the CEO from 1994 until 2002 when he sold the company and still continued
on as a director afterwards until 2007. Afterwards, Berwick went forth to
live on and travel the world by sailboat but after one year of sailing his
boat sank in a storm off the coast of El Salvador. After being saved clinging
to his surfboard with nothing but a pair of surfing shorts left of all his
material possessions he decided to "live nowhere" and travel the world as
spontaneously as possible with one overarching goal: See and understand the
world with his own eyes, not through the lens of the media.

He went on to visit nearly 100 countries over four years and did and saw things
that no education could ever teach. He met and spoke with a plethora of amazing
people, from self-made billionaires to some of the brightest minds in finance
- as well as entrepreneurs from a broad range of backgrounds and locations
from tech companies in southern China to resource developers in Mongolia,
Thailand, Russia and Chile. He also read everything he could find on how the
world really works... politically and financially. A pursuit he continues
to this day.

He expatriated, long ago from his country of birth, Canada, and considers
himself a citizen of the world. He has lived in numerous locales since including
Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Bangkok and currently lives in Acapulco, Mexico and
is building a home in Cafayate, Argentina. In essence, everything he writes
about here for TDV he has done or is doing.

As well, during his travels, both real and virtual (through the internet),
he met some amazing people who have a similar shared vision of what is currently
going on in the world and enticed them to come aboard TDV and provide their
own brand of analysis.